Friday, August 31, 2012

That would be the general proclamation at an outdoor concert. However, for my brother and I, it worked in our favor. Having grown up on a steady diet of arena rock in the 1980s, my brother and I were well acquainted with the music of Loverboy, Pat Benatar, and Journey. It seemed a more than worthwhile bill, but being cheap, we still only shelled out the minimum amount of bucks to get ourselves general admission seating.

Livestrong Sporting Park in Kansas City, KS

Those seats proved to be as far from the stage as possible, but at least they were covered. Sure, while we watched Loverboy perform the first set, it could have been anyone on the stage and we wouldn't have known the difference, but at least we were dry.

Loverboy, image from classicrockmagazine.com

Loverboy's Set List

Queen of the Broken Hearts

Lovin' Every Minute of It

The Kid Is Hot Tonite

When It's Over

Hot Girls in Love

Turn Me Loose

Working for the Weekend

Loverboy's "Turn Me Loose" live in Vancouver in 2012

Screw being dry. By the end of the Loverboy set, we'd rethought our plan. When we first arrived, we had to pick up our GA tickets and were asked if we wanted to trade them in for floor seats. We were a bit thrown by this, but ultimately opted for dry seats. After Loverboy's set, though, my brother went back to check to see if we could still get ground seats. Sure enough, we were able to trade in our dry seats for wet ones. Now we could actually see what was going on.

Pat Benatar, image from myq105.cbslocal.com

Pat Benatar's Set List

All Fired Up

Invincible

Promises in the Dark

We Belong

You Better Run

Hit Me with Your Best Shot

Love Is a Battlefield

Heartbreaker/Ring of Fire

Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker/Ring of Fire" live in 2012

It rained all through Benatar's set. We headed for the restrooms during the break and loaded up on paper towels to dry our seats and, as best as possible, ourselves. Surely the rain would let up.

It didn't. But it didn't matter. We had good seats (well, visibility wise) and it was our first time seeing Journey in concert. Sure, it wasn't Steve Perry on vocals, but vocalist Arnel Pineda handled himself admirably.

Journey, image from arnelpineda.ning.com

Journey's Set List

Faith in the Heartland

Anyway You Want It

Ask the Lonely

Only the Young

Who's Crying Now

Faithfully

The Star Spangled Banner

Stone in Love

Lights

Neal Schon solo

Wheel in the Sky

Escape

Jonathan Cain solo

Open Arms

La Do Da

Anytime

Be Good to Yourself

Don't Stop Believin'

Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)

Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'

In the end, we were wet, but happy. We'd paid for the cheap seats, but got some of the best seats in the house.

Here's Journey performing "Faithfully." The sound quality is terrible, but it is actually video from the KC show!

Review:
“Highway 61 Revisited is “Bob Dylan’s most relentless and flawless album,” TL but also his “most accessible rock album and its historic importance cannot be understated. This record changed the face of popular music, and serves as proof of his legendary status as one of the true masters of both words and music.” NO

“Taking the first, electric side of Bringing It All Back Home to its logical conclusion, Bob Dylan hired a full rock & roll band” AMG for Highway 61 Revisited. The result? He “invents folk music from the future. Dylan didn’t abandon folk music; he just hauled it forward a few centuries. Out went acoustic hymns of protest, in came a whirlwind of images – mad, random, yet cruelly precise.” BL

Tombstone Blues

“Powered by Mike Bloomfield’s slashing guitar lines and Al Kooper’s bracing, rudimentary organ,” TL “the music combines elements of Mississippi blues and Dylan’s Minnesotan roots, thus the title Highway 61 Revisited, which stretches from Dylan’s homeland to the Delta.” RV Indeed, “the album’s nine tracks ran the spectrum” NO from “blues (It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry) to flat-out garage rock (Tombstone Blues, From a Buick 6, Highway 61 Revisited)” AMG and the “reflective folk-rock” AMG of the “acoustic 11-minute epic, Desolation Row.” NO

Desolation Row

On just a commercial level, “Highway 61 gave Dylan his big break with Like a Rolling Stone,” NO “one of the greatest songs in rock ‘n’ roll history.” RV With its classic organ riff and steady beat” NO to accompany the “pistol-crack snare that opens” TL it, “the six-minute single crushed the limitations of the three-minute pop single, and went on to become a number two hit.” NO It was “a rambling epic that redefined the pop song.” RV

Like a Rolling Stone

“Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster” AMG and the “voice of a generation.” NO “Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock.” AMG This was “an existential album with some of the most vivid lyrics ever heard by the human ear,” RV “all psychic chaos and information overload.” BL

What remains astonishing is that “Dylan brought a level of intelligence to rock music that no one had previously thought possible” NO but simultaneously “it proved that rock & roll needn’t be collegiate and tame in order to be literate, poetic, and complex.” AMG

“The next forty years of Dylan’s career would trace the routes mapped out on this album, and most of these songs remain part of his concert repertoire to this day.” TL

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Gen X’ers may still want their MTV, but the version they loved is as distant a memory as Valley Girl speak, parachute pants, and leg warmers. Wake up and smell the VEVO.
In the summer of 1981, I was psyching myself up for the treacherous journey known as high school. With my geek identity already firmly in place, my adolescence would not be marked by dances, football games, and parties. No, I was destined to wile away my teen years in my parents’ basement consumed by television, music, and crushes on unattainable celebrities.

Luckily, a source for satisfying all three of those needs entered the world that same summer. MTV, born on the 1st of August in 1981, soundtracked not just my youth, but an entire generation. Kids finally saw what some of their favorite artists looked like and were exposed to new music absent from radio playlists. The channel’s programming was dominated by three-to-four minute music promos designed to steer kids directly to the latest mall to unload their allowances at Musicland, Sam Goody, and Camelot.

Martha Quinn, Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, J.J. Jackson, and Alan Hunter served as navigators and heartthrobs, ushering in a new era where the jockeys who plugged the hits didn’t just have to sound good, but look good. They became stars as big as the musicians they touted.

Fast forward 30 years and the music video’s homeland has shifted from television to the Internet. The territory once staked by MTV has been snatched up by YouTube – with a huge caveat. Much to the dismay of record companies, the Web belongs to everyone. The dawn of the digital age put illegal downloads in the hard drives of anyone with a browser. YouTube allows any owner of a smart phone to post content which may or may not be copyrighted.

Along came VEVO to serve as the delivery system for “official” videos. To pat themselves on the back, they introduced certified awards this past summer. The awards, modeled after gold and platinum records for albums and singles, recognizes VEVO videos seen by more than 100 million pairs of eyeballs.

Being a list addict, I lapped it up. However, the average Gen X’er might be more inclined to throw up. This isn’t a list populated by early classics like Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” or Def Leppard’s “Photograph”. In today’s YouTube world, Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” rule the roost.

Justin Bieber's "Baby", #1 on the VEVO list

In fact, as of mid-August, 79 of the 100 videos on the VEVO list are from 2009 on. Only two videos date back to the 20th century: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (1983) and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” (1992).

Those two videos could bookend what Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum call the “Golden Age” of MTV (1981-1992) in their book, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Dutton, 2011). On my Dave’s Music Database blog, I aggregated more than 50 sources into a post on the Top 100 Videos of All Time. It serves as a vivid walk down memory lane for anyone who spent the Golden Age plopped in front of the tube. More than half the videos stem from that era and a mere 13 hail from the 21st century. The newest song on the list, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” from 2008, is ancient by VEVO standards.

Why such a drastic change? Among Marks and Tannenbaum’s rationale for capping the Golden Age at 1992 was the birth of reality programming. That year’s show The Real World signified a move away from music videos which, in the minds of Gen X’ers, destroyed MTV.

Check out the comments section on YouTube videos for MTV ads and promos of yesteryear. The scathing attacks start with the observation that the “M” used to stand for music. A mix of resentment and reminiscing follows – it reads like someone recalling good times with an ex before things went sour. A colorful array of profanities generally spices up the bitter diatribes.

It may seem unfathomable that the station once renowned for cutting edge videos like Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and Aha’s “Take on Me” now champions reality-TV stars like Snooki and The Situation. However, here’s something my fellow 40-somethings forget: you aren’t 14, anymore.

It’s okay to fondly remember vegging out to music videos for hours at a time or hanging out at the mall and buying the latest cassettes by Journey and Styx. However, even if MTV, malls, and cassettes were still pillars of modern society, they wouldn’t be central to your life anymore. As soon as marriage, mortgages, and mini-versions of yourself (aka children) entered the picture, MTV was jettisoned. It’s hard to make a priority of seeing a Madonna world premiere video when Junior is screeching at the top of his lungs for his bottle.

You outgrew MTV’s demographic 15-20 years ago. Whereas they haven’t aged in that they maintain an ever-vigilant pursuit of the youth market. Ehow.com says today’s MTV is targeted toward ages 12 to 25 (“What Are the Demographics of MTV Viewers?”, 17 May 2009). When the kids started turning to other sources for music, MTV had to overhaul its programming to stay relevant and profitable. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes is quoted in I Want My MTV as saying “at some point the ‘M’ in MTV changed from ‘Music’ to ‘Money.’” Network executives aren’t going to alienate their teen and twentysomething base just because Generation X feels nostalgic.

Once upon a time you may have huddled around the lockers in high school halls to profess Tawny Kitaen’s hotness in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”. Today’s adolescent whips out a smart phone to show off her homemade video of her singing Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” with her BFF. Meanwhile ,you now gather around the water cooler with co-workers to spout lines like, “Here we go again” when someone asks which political party you’re backing in the USA’s Presidential election.

Even if MTV had never strayed from music, Katy Perry’s “Firework” and LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” would rule the roost these days, not Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. As proclaimed in the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”, the first video to air on MTV, “We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far / Pictures came and broke your heart.”

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Elvis Costello was born Declan McManus in Liverpool, England, on August 25, 1954. He came out of the British punk/new wave scene in 1977 and became one of the most celebrated musicians of all time with his diverse abilities for dipping his toe into multiple musical genres including R&B, country, and classical. While these lists reflect a definite emphasis on his work from the ‘70s and ‘80s, Costello continues to make adventurous music. His fans never know just where he might go on his next album.

Sales, chart date, awards, and appearances on best-of lists are factored into the song and album lists. The song list also includes appearances on Elvis Costello specific lists and compilations.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

UltimateClassicRock.com has a list of the Top 100 Classic Rock Songs. There’s no indication how and when this list was compiled, but they adhere to – in my opinion – the dumb twists of restricting each artist to only one entry. It invites immediate argument not just about where a song ranks on the list, but why this is the one chosen to represent the band. If you only get one Van Halen song, is “Everybody Wants Some” the way to go? How much validity should one give a list which doesn’t have classic rock staples like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Part II,” The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” and – most shockingly of all – the song which consistently tops classic rock lists: Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”? All of these appear in the DMDB’s list of The Top 100 Classic Rock Songs of All Time, an aggregate of 29 lists, including UltimateClassicRock.com’s list.

Still, the songs that are included make for a pretty good starting point for any beginner’s classic rock library. There’s also some nice commentaries to accompany the songs. Of course, this also leads to my second pet peeve about web-based lists. I hate the style of making a reader click through one page at a time to reveal the list. I’m sure you think you’re building suspense or can spread out blog posts to one a day that way, but it is annoying. If you insist on slowly unveiling the list, then at least give the reader the full list at the end and let them go back and click on whatever song titles they want. To that end, I’ve done it for you. Here are the Top 100 Classic Rock Songs, according to UltimateClassicRock.com. The links take you to their commentary about the songs. Enjoy.

Monday, August 20, 2012

In honor of Robert Plant’s birthday (born August 20, 1948), here’s a list of the best Led Zeppelin songs. The list was determined by combining the points the songs had in Dave’s Music Database along with a consolidation of 14 specific Led Zeppelin best-of lists. This song was originally posted on the DMDB Facebook page.

21. Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You (1969)
22. The Song Remains the Same (1973)
23. What Is and What Should Never Be (1969)
24. Hey Hey What Can I Do (1970)
25. Trampled Under Foot (1975)
26. Moby Dick (1969)
27. Ten Years Gone (1975)
28. All My Love (1979)
29. Living Loving Maid (1969)
30. Communication Breakdown (1969)

31. How Many More Times (1969)
32. Houses of the Holy (1975)
33. Gallows Pole (1970)
34. Bring It on Home (1969)
35. No Quarter (1973)
36. In My Time of Dying (1975)
37. The Wanton Song (1975)
38. The Battle of Evermore (1971)
39. Bron-Y-Aur Stomp (1970)
40. Misty Mountain Hop (1971)

Saturday, August 18, 2012

On August 18, 1956, Elvis Presley topped the charts with the double-A-sided single, “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” This week also marks the 35th anniversary of The King’s death (August 16, 1977). In memory of perhaps the greatest artist in the history of popular music, here are his top 100 songs as determined by sales, chart figures, awards, rank on multiple best-of lists, and appearances on compilations (live albums, anthologies, box sets).

Review:
“Kind of Blue has been called the most famous and influential jazz recording of all time.” NO Truth be told, “when you find jazzers, rock and popular music followers actually unanimously unite over one record, then you know something must be right.” CL “Taking jazz way beyond cool,” BL “Miles left his most lasting mark” TL with Kind of Blue, an album that “isn’t merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it’s an album that towers above its peers” AMG and “has influenced generations of jazz and other musicians.” YN “Many consider this recording to be one of the most important jazz recordings of any era.” NRR Davis’ “approach to blues and improvisation here was revolutionary.” BL “Although it took three decades to sell one million copies, it has sold another two million since Davis died in 1991,” YN making it “the best-selling jazz disc of all time.” TL

“Miles Davis, trumpeter and composer,” NRR was “a major star by the late ‘50s,” BL having “already remade jazz in his own image several times over.” TL “The Birth of Cool introduced a smooth, sophisticated approach, and then Walkin' heated things up again. His classic ‘50s quintet raised the bar for small-group improvisation.” TL As Miles Davis’ son Erin said, his father “was never one to dwell on the past and always moved on to embrace new styles.” YN

Freddie Freeloader

While Kind of Blue “reinforced his rep as a trendsetter and innovator,” BL “it was the tuneful grace” BL of “a superb ensemble of musicians” NRR “that made this a classic.” BL Davis “assembled an unprecedented all-star team” TL of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (alto sax), Bill Evans (piano), Wynton Kelly (piano on Freddie Freeloader), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums) and John Coltrane (tenor sax) “right before he began his legendary solo career.” RV In “less than ten hours of actual recording time at Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio,” YN they banged out what is “generally considered as the definitive jazz album.” AMG Clarke Speicher, of The Review, calls it “the most important, as well as one of the most beautiful albums, in the history…[of] jazz.” RV

So What

“Why does Kind of Blue possess such a mystique? Perhaps because this music never flaunts its genius. It lures listeners in with the slow, luxurious bassline and gentle piano chords of So What. From that moment on, the record never really changes pace – each tune has a similar relaxed feel, as the music flows easily.” AMG “His songs sound deceptively simple, but more complicated harmonies lurk just beneath the surface. The sparseness shows a more introspective direction from the fast and furious sound of be-bop that had dominated jazz.” RV “The lack of the dense harmonic digressions associated with Bop give the music its unhurried, meditative, but still intense feel, beautifully illustrated in All Blues or ‘So What.’” WR

All Blues

“It’s the pinnacle of modal jazz,” AMG an approach which Davis described as he was on the brink of making this album: “I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.” JI

These “open-ended songs…were given just one or two takes – and the glorious results…are simultaneously delicate and powerful, and teeming with life.” TL In the album’s original liner notes, Bill Evans says “the band did not play through any of these pieces prior to recording. Davis laid out the themes before the tape rolled, and then the band improvised. The end results were wondrous and still crackle with vitality.” AMG

“Kind of Blue became a how-to of jazz recordings, a standard by which all others would be judged.” RV “Seasoned jazz fans return to this record even after they’ve memorized every nuance. They return because this is an exceptional band…of the greatest in history, playing at the peak of its power.” AMG “It is advanced music that is extraordinarily enjoyable. It may be a stretch to say that if you don’t like Kind of Blue, you don’t like jazz – but it’s hard to imagine it as anything other than a cornerstone of any jazz collection.” AMG